Hidden Away

An old co-worker shared an article about a teen who committed suicide after being targeted by an extortionist. The scheme has become known as sextortion, and, from what I understand, has become fairly common. Tragic endings to it, fortunately, are still fairly rare. It's the sort of thing that gets people up in arms, but I think that there's a social component to it that's often missed.

While often described as a scam, it's more accurately seen as a form of blackmail. Here's how one Reddit group describes it:

This scam occurs when you meet a woman/man on dating service/social media site/forum/wherever and they ask you to go on Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram, or another messaging system. They will ask you to exchange naked pictures, and they will usually ask you to include your face in the pictures. They will then threaten to reveal the pictures to your family/friends if you do not pay them.

Where things go entirely off the rails is when a teen doesn't have the money to pay the escalating demands for money (since extortionists don't stop with a single payment) and is convinced that being dead is better than being outed.

American society, while not perhaps literally Puritanical about it, tends to be uncomfortable with sexuality, especially young adult sexuality. High school and college students are often expected to be effectively neuter, with no sexual feelings or even an understanding that sex exists. And this is what the extortionists play on; a young person's desire to live up to this unrealistic expectation. Accordingly, there is a need to hide this part of themselves. And society often plays along with that. Consider this description of sextortion from the article:

The scheme is when scammers target people, often young boys, and coerce them into sending explicit images.

Casting the young person involved as having been coerced into sending the photos that are then used against them avoids recognizing that young people are quite often easily prompted to act without thinking when there is a promise of sex, a relationship or even being seen as sexually desirable.

Greater understanding and acceptance of this would, I think, go a long way towards averting some of these tragedies. A person letting their sexuality get the better of their good sense shouldn't be something that young people feel will result in them being cast out of the families and peer networks. The shame that America society uses as a means of social control can come with a higher cost than makes any sort of sense.